Pro-View Anti-Fog & Goggle Cleaner

Two of the biggest headaches in paintball are fogged up goggles and head-shots. Fogging is a nightmare for all the obvious reasons. If you can't see you could trip over an exposed root and kill yourself, or, worse yet, not see the opponent sneaking up on you through the brush and get yourself lit up like a target at the chrono station. This of course could lead to your taking a head-shot, which we all hate because it means that you'll have to clean thick paint off your once-shiny new lens.

Until recently, the lens cleaner I've most frequently used to clean the last smears of paint from my lens has been (easily grossed out readers may want to excuse themselves from the next word) spit. I've tried a spray bottle full of soapy water, but it's difficult to get the last streaks of soap off the lens. Water alone is OK, but it can leave streaks of oil on your lens and doesn't dry very quickly.

I recently acquired a bottle of Pro-Team's new Pro-View anti-fog and cleaning solution. I went and pulled out my goggles which I must admit I hadn't cleaned since I played last weekend. They were pretty ugly. I sprayed a couple of spritzes of the stuff onto the lens and wiped it off with a paper towel. I was very impressed. The solution not only cleared the old paint away (certainly much better than spit ever did), but it dried within a second of my last wipe with a paper towel. Very nice. I tried breathing a few deep humid breaths on the lens and couldn't get any fog to stick. To compare, I tried breathing on my untreated extra set of goggles, which fogged up very easily. I then treated them and was again incapable of fogging up the lens.

When I got it out on the field, I found Pro-View to be equally effective in cleaning away fresh spray and splatter, even that nightmarish wax-filled Zap paint.

I must admit that I am more excited about the cleaning ability of Pro-View than its anti-fog characteristics. There are a lot of good anti-fog products out there, but I have yet to find anything that cleans paint off this well. Furthermore, even the strongest anti-fog treatments cave in under the rigors of extended summer heat and humidity. For most players who have fogging problems, the best solution is to spend the extra money on a double-paned thermal lens and/or a goggle fan.

Good as this stuff is for individual players, I imagine that field operators will simply go nuts for this stuff. While thermal lenses are wonderful, they are also expensive and require special care to prevent ruining the delicate inner lens. Few field operators are willing to absorb the extra expense of putting thermal lenses on their rental goggles which would almost certainly be ruined as quickly as they could install them. As a consequence they get a lot of players coming back and complaining of fogged up goggles. With Pro-View, they'll be able to quickly clean and anti-fog treat their rental goggles.

At a suggested retail price of $7.95 for a 4 oz. spray-bottle, Pro-View certainly doesn't share the economic advantages of spit. But when you consider that for the same price you only get half as much of the competing product from JT, Pro-View doesn't look quite so expensive. And while 4 oz. doesn't sound (or look) like very much, I've found that it only really takes one spray to effectively clean and defog a messed up lens, so one bottle should last a reasonable amount of time.

In short, Pro-View works as advertised. From my experiences, it defogs as well as, and cleans better than everything else I've tried.